June 29, 2006

Actually there are no absolute answers to this question. There are a lot of suggestions and some may help, but I don’t think anyone has the definitive answer to the problem of e-mail spam.

Anthony Parsons has started a thread How To Stop Email Spam? Hopefully there will be some suggestions that will help webmasters to deal with the problem of e-mail spam.

One thing I did about 2 years ago was to get rid of my catch all account. Most of the Spam i was receiving at that time was in the catch all account. I use an coded email address on my site which is not full proof but helps a lot. I have different e-mail boxes set up for different types of e-mail. If I start getting to many Spam e-mails on one of those in boxes I delete the in-box. Then the crap goes to the catch all and is deleted off the server.

I never check e-mail with my e-mail client. I use MailWasher to check for e-mail and delete the spam before it is down loaded to my PC. Another good program that I recently found out about is K9. Personally I don’t like K9 as much as I do MailWasher, but I do recommend it as a spam fighting tool for your PC.

June 24, 2006

What are good links from the standpoint of who links to you and who you link to? That is a question that every webmaster needs to keep in mind.

Personally I’m not to concerned about who links to me if I can’t control that link.

I am concerned about who I link to because linking to the wrong sites can get you into trouble.

This brings up the question of recipicol link exchanges. Personally I don’t do them. Under certain circumstances they could be alright, but they can get a site into trouble.

Vanessa Fox from Google Engineering (part of the sitemaps team) says you want natural links. Matt Cutts has been saying the same thing for sometime but thought I would add the voice of someone else.

Vanessa said:

Keep in mind that our algorithms can distinguish natural links from unnatural links. Natural links are links to your site that develop as part of the dynamic nature of the web when other sites find your content valuable and think it would be helpful for their visitors. Unnatural links are links to your site placed there specifically to make your site look more popular to search engines. Some of these types of links are covered in our webmaster guidelines:

In general, linking to web spammers and “bad neighborhoods” can harm your site’s indexing and ranking. While links from these sites probably won’t harm your site, they won’t help your indexing or ranking. Only natural links add value and are helpful for indexing and ranking your site.

Why do webmasters seek links?

Because they have read outdated information that used to be true but no longer is IMHO. Because of the outdated information they continue to chase links. They also chase the little green bar in their browser(or TB PR).

I still see way too many people looking at PageRank when seeking links. You’d think Big Daddy had burned enough noses that link chasers would stop sniffing around PR, but apparently they are a tough breed to teach.

In the last two years or so I have seen a change in the mentality of some people in regard to links. However, many people keep coming across bad information, and unfortunately they believe it. Fortunately there are a few places that webmasters can learn the truth. I wholeheartedly suggest IHY forums. I’m not as familiar with Anthony Parsons forum as I am with IHY, but I do recommend it.

To me a good link is one that will help the visitors of a website find the information they are looking for.

June 22, 2006

The original Google Patient by Brian and Sergy led to what I call, and many others do “Link Mongers”. That phrase refers to webmasters who believe the secrete to ranking with Google is the number of back links you have. Another way to say Link Mongers is Link Schemes.

Hopefully I can show in my next post that there is a difference between quantity and quality of links according to Google.

One thing that resulted from the link mania phase was schemes to enable webmasters to get 100’s or thousands of back links based on putting a simple script on their webpages.

The two most popular are the Digital Point Coop, and Link Vault as far as I know. Over the last few months there have been a lot of post at DP in regard to problems that participating sites were having.

In the last few days there have been a lot of blog post in addition to forum post in regard to Link Vault.

One difference in Link Vault and the DP coop is that DP has not been banned but some users of both schemes have lost rankings at the very least.

Both offer link schemes in order to fools the SEs. That used to work, but it looks to me like those days are numbered. Yes you may use one of these schemes and still get by with it for a period of time, but the day is coming when every site using this type of scheme to artificially inflate their link popularity will be hit with the reality that the SEs are onto this.

Another type of link scheme is site A links to B, B links to C, and C links to A. It’s amazing the things people will try in an attempt to fool the SEs.

June 15, 2006

Years ago a couple of guys named Larry Page and Sergy Brin developed a way to determine the importance of a website based on the number of links found on the web pointing to the site.

This was the result of a paper they were preparing for their doctoral thesis, and today Stanford University actually owns the patient. Ultimately this led to the development of what we know as Google.

Unfortunately it led to what I and a few others would refer to as Link Mania.

Web masters started looking for ways to get 1000’s of links to their sites just to help them with the new SE Google as it grew in importance.

Grow in importance Google did. Today Google holds the largest market share of the 3 majors, Google, MSN, Yahoo. I don’t think of Ask as a major contender at this time, but they are growing. If I named the big 4 rather than the big 3 I would add Ask to the list.

Google became so important that at least as far back as 2003 Yahoo and MSN were getting their results from Google. Sometime around the end of 2003 or early 2004 Yahoo launched their own SE and MSN went with Yahoo. Today MSN has their own SE.

Initially from my experience ranking with Yahoo was strictly based on page content. Today it seems like Yahoo and MSN have got Caught up in the Link Mania thing.

At the same time Google seems to be taking steps to discourage Link Mania.

My next two post will be about
Link Schemes
Good links

Comments Off on Link Mania

June 12, 2006

This is a topic that comes up occasionally in forums when black hat SEO techniques are being discussed. Many so called whit hats who are friends with black hat SEOs, (and want to defend them), start saying that Incompetent, or Newbie SEOs are worse for the Internet than their black hat friends.

Personally I do not think a ignorant SEO is worse than a black hat SEO. The difference being that the (black hat) is intentionally trying to deceive the SEs, while the ignorant SEO is floundering around looking for answers.

Even though I do not think a ignorant, uninformed SEO is worse than a black hat SEO, I do think the Internet community needs to be aware of them. I think new webmasters who are looking for a SEO needs to be aware of ignorant incompetent SEOs. Especially when they work for a Company that is doing SEO work for clients.

June 7, 2006

Over the last few years I have seen constant bit***ng by web masters that Google was showing the title and DMOZ (aka ODP) listing for their site in the SERPs. Strange people B**ch that they can’t get listed in DMOZ, and then they b**ch that Google in someway uses the DMOZ listing in the SERPs.

Recently MSN started doing the same thing. As expected there was an outcry from webmasters. MSN seems to have responded. MSN has invented a new meta tag to tell their spiders not to use ODP information.

In short they MSN offers two meta tags that have to be put on each page (robots.txt) will not work.

[meta content=”NOODP” name=”ROBOTS”]

or

[meta content=”NOODP” name=”msnbot”]

Change the square brackets to angle brackets. In other words use proper html tags.

In theory the first of these applies to all crawlers and the second just to us. As far as we know right now, we are the only search engine to support this tag, so the two are the same for the moment. But when others follow suit, you could use the second tag to get only MSN to ignore ODP content for your page.

June 1, 2006

I ask for a couple of reasons. I have seen the name shoemoney around. Today I received what appears to be a spambot attempt to post in this blog. I think it was a spambot because it was able to post without registration. Since all first time post are on moderation nothing is actually posted unless I approve it.

Frankly I do not understand how spambots get around the registration process.

The post was from http://www.imyourhuckleberry..info. This URL redirects to shoemoney. .com (note I have added an extra period to all pertinent URLs).